Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Making Tracks With a New Old Sound

Diane Birch performing this month at Rockwood Music Hall in Manhattan.Credit
Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

There are very few pop musicians under the age of Dolly Parton who wouldn’t bristle at being called “old-fashioned,” and yet the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Diane Birch understands that her biography and music could lead someone to believe that she may possess such qualities.

“I swear, I grew up like I was from another era,” said Ms. Birch, 30, the daughter of a Seventh-day Adventist minister who moved his family around the world, with stops in Michigan, Zimbabwe and South Africa before settling in Portland, Ore., when she was 10. “My mother and father were 20 years older than my friends’ parents, and they were incredibly religious, so while I’m definitely not conservative or traditional by any means, I am, in a sense, a little old-fashioned.”

She added, “Besides, lots of times, I gravitate to things that are really old-fashioned, because in my mind I think that they’re so ahead of the game.”

Bridging both worlds, Ms. Birch is about to release an album that puts much of the last half-century of pop music through a blender in a way that sounds modern and fresh. Titled “Speak a Little Louder” (S-Curve Records), it features piano ballads, R&B and funk mingling with a pulsing update of ’90s synth pop, with layered vocals drizzled atop much of the album. That musical adventurousness is reflected in two high-profile appearances this year, at the Prince tribute at Carnegie Hall in March and last month, when she joined Elvis Costello and the Roots at Brooklyn Bowl to duet with Mr. Costello on a song from “Wise Up Ghost,” the album they just released.

The new album is a follow-up to her acclaimed 2009 debut, “Bible Belt.” Ms. Birch had little radio airplay with that album’s single “Nothing but a Miracle,” but she nevertheless performed on most of the late-night talk shows. She quickly gained a legion of high-profile supporters including Prince, Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, Daryl Hall, Mark Ronson, Ne-Yo and the Roots. She ate sashimi with Mick Jagger and opened for Stevie Wonder. Ms. Birch had, in effect, arrived before most people had even heard of her.

And just like that, she was gone again. At a time when artists normally try to capitalize on their momentum, she receded from public view and didn’t reappear with a new batch of songs for almost four years, because of a combination of writer’s block, dissatisfaction with the works she was producing and personal loss — coupled with dealing with the crushing expectations that usually do not accompany artists who have sold just over 72,000 copies of their debut album.

Photo

“I gravitate to things that are really old-fashioned, because in my mind I think that they’re so ahead of the game,” said the singer-songwriter Diane Birch.Credit
Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

Musically, her new release is less rooted in a particular era than “Bible Belt,” which drew inspiration from the 1960s and ’70s. But lyrically, it advances some themes from its predecessor, like the simultaneously confining and liberating qualities of pain and the paralysis brought about by self-doubt.

“I desperately wanted to show another side of myself,” Ms. Birch said over tea on the terrace of a cafe in the meatpacking district. “I had been so pigeonholed from ‘Bible Belt.’ ”

For “Speak a Little Louder,” Ms. Birch, who in conversation uses a variety of sound effects to simulate things like a radio being toggled between stations or a needle hitting a vinyl record, and whose personal style could be described as “coven meets couture,” wrote songs with the soul singer Betty Wright, Matt Hales (who records as Aqualung) and Eg White, who has worked with Adele and Joss Stone. Mr. Hales and Mr. White also produced their tracks.

The new album’s first single, “All the Love You Got,” is an amalgam of the album’s most common musical threads, including gospel-flecked background vocals and a propulsive backbeat, in this instance provided by the bassist John Taylor of Duran Duran and the drummer Questlove of the Roots. “I heard that demo, and it was irresistible,” Mr. Taylor said. “I just thought, ‘I’ve got to get on this fantastic song one way or the other.’ ”

Although she continues to attract admirers, Ms. Birch has not been without her detractors. They considered “Bible Belt” an imitation of Laura Nyro and Carole King, whose “Tapestry” is widely considered the benchmark album for female singer-songwriters.

“To be honest with you, I hadn’t heard ‘Tapestry’ until six months before I got a publishing deal in the U.K. in 2007,” Ms. Birch said. “In this business, people put you in a little box: You have brown hair, and you play piano, you’re like that.”

After nearly two years of touring, during which she’d been called “everything from indie to electro to country, folk, gospel and soul,” Ms. Birch said, she went into the studio to record the follow-up to “Bible Belt.” She developed an obsession with the disco producer Giorgio Moroder and harbored a nascent desire to record a disco album, which was at odds with much of the music she had already written. So she began to experiment with new sounds and textures. Songs she was unable to retrofit were jettisoned. She embarked on a “miserable” monthlong writing stint in London, which resulted in her first single, but little else.

Photo

Diane Birch after a show in Los Angeles in 2010.Credit
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times

“I would get 20 different song ideas a day,” Ms. Birch explained. “It was insane. I would be like: ‘Come on, give me a break. Don’t give me 20. I just want one.’ ”

At the point where she began to see progress, her writing was delayed even further when her beloved father, Alfred, became ill with cancer (he died in January), and she ended a long-term relationship. Ms. Birch had also begun her third year of recording her sophomore effort, a delay that is dangerous territory for a younger artist.

By chance, she had met Homer Steinweiss, drummer for the Brooklyn funk-soul outfit the Dap-Kings, at a party, and he invited her to the Dunham Records studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he recorded and produced several tracks. During their first session together, they wrote a song, “Staring at You,” and it was then that “Speak a Little Louder” began to take shape.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“When I met her, I understood that she was frustrated,” said Mr. Steinweiss, who played on Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” as well as the soul singer Sharon Jones’s records with the Dap-Kings. “But she’s obviously insanely talented, and it’s not often you sit down with a piano player, singer-songwriter, female or male, who has chops like she does on the piano to back up her songwriting.” He ended up as co-writer and producer for nearly half of the record.

And while the shift in style may be unexpected for some fans, it is certainly not out of character for Ms. Birch to try something new. Or old, if circumstances dictate.

“This year, I wrote a Christmas song for Susan Boyle, which I personally thought was a total masterpiece,” she said. “I was sure that I was going to be ridiculously wealthy off of the royalties.”

The publishing company, however, passed on the track, saying it was too, as Ms. Birch put it, “old-fashioned” and “dated” — even though Ms. Boyle’s forthcoming record features a “duet” with Elvis Presley. Ms. Birch was dumbfounded.

“I was like, ‘Dude, it could have been on “The Muppets” or been the Carpenters classic that we never knew about,’ ” she said. “Besides, what does that even mean, dated? Is it good or is it not good?”

A version of this article appears in print on October 13, 2013, on Page AR22 of the New York edition with the headline: Making Tracks With a New Old Sound. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe